A number of clinical laboratory tests are oftentimes required to treat a person. Since a person's health is at stake, the reliability of the results of these tests is of great import. Accordingly, in some cases, a secondary review of the clinical laboratory result value from a particular test is desirable.
In the past, numerous approaches have been used to review and authenticate clinical laboratory result values within an automated system. Typically, a limited number of review criteria have been employed to trigger secondary review. These review criteria included limited delta checking of the clinical test result to a previous test result for the person, and specified high, low and critical ranges for particular test result values. In other cases, the service resource to which an order was to be routed (the area of the laboratory at which the work is performed) initiated a secondary review. The prior automated systems do not provide review criteria for microbiology lab results based on susceptibility results. Susceptibility results test a bacteria's susceptibility or resistance to one or more antibiotics.
The delta checking in prior systems was calculated solely by the difference between a patient's prior test result and current test result. If the difference between the two results was specified range or percentage, review would be triggered. This set range or percentage difference was inflexible and could not be changed depending on the result value, patient species, patient age or patient gender.
If patient data satisfied these limited review criteria, the data was routed to a review queue defined by the location or work area in the laboratory where the patient sample was tested. By way of example, the chemistry work area had a review queue to which only chemistry results could be routed. As such, hematology results could not be routed to the chemistry review queue.
These systems also provided limited review queue functionality. Only one user at a time could review and approve results. Further, these systems also did not provide the ability to route results to review as read only. All results required approval by the user before they were released.